The Lost Mariner

The self-confidence that kept Columbus going was his undoing.

In August, 1498, three months into his Third Voyage, Christopher Columbus found himself sailing toward the nipple of the world. He had just spent several weeks navigating off what he believed to be an island in the Far East but was actually Venezuela, and during that time he had noticed several curious phenomena. Great quantities of fresh water were flowing into the ocean; the climate seemed unusually temperate for a region so close to the equator; and the North Star was wandering from its course. Putting all this together, Columbus reasoned that the world was shaped like a ball with a breastlike protuberance. He felt himself not just crossing the ocean but going up it, his whole ship being lifted gently toward the sky. Had he reached the very tip of the protuberance, he concluded, he would have sailed straight into the Terrestrial Paradise. He found this theory so compelling that two months later he sent news of it in a long letter to his patrons, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain. What they made of it was not recorded.

Columbus was one of history's great optimists. When he read in Marco Polo that the palace of the Japanese king had floors of gold "two fingers thick," he accepted it as fact. Cuba, he was convinced, was part of the Malay Peninsula; things of value were more plentiful in the south; and the riches of the Orient—or, barring that, the rewards of Paradise—were always just around the corner. On all of these points, of course, he was wrong, and should have been fatally so, except that he was also fantastically lucky.

Columbus made four round-trip voyages from Spain to the New World, each of which was a stunning feat of seamanship. To sail west across the Atlantic, a ship needs to find the easterly trade winds; to sail east it has to find the less consistent westerlies, and can easily end up becalmed. Several times, Columbus almost didn't make it back. Returning from his First Voyage, he ran into a storm so ferocious that he decided his best hope for posterity was to write up an account of his discoveries, seal it in a barrel, and toss the whole thing overboard. (This manuscript was "found" four centuries later, in a wonderfully clumsy fraud.) But Columbus kept squeaking by and, in keeping with his general view of things, interpreted his good fortune as a sign that he had been singled out by God. In his later years, he assembled a book of Biblical passages showing that his discoveries were a prelude to the Day of Judgment, and took to signing his name with an elaborate Christological cryptogram. By this point, he may or may not have been mad.

The version of Columbus's life that most of us grew up on was invented in the early nineteenth century. Probably the most famous "fact" about Columbus—his insistence, against overwhelming scholastic opposition, that the world was round—was the work of a fabulist, Washington Irving, who wrote the first modern biography of the explorer. (Irving concocted the "fact" to back up his thesis that Columbus's journeys expressed a bold, proto-American rationalism.) Subsequently, Columbus was taken up by Irish and Italian immigrants, who saw his story, or what passed for it, as proof that Catholicism was no bar to patriotism. The four-hundredth anniversary of his discovery of the New World, in 1892, prompted a yearlong national celebration that included, among scores of tributes, the creation of Columbus Circle in Manhattan. In 1985, Congress established the Christopher Columbus Quincentenary Jubilee Commission, apparently assuming that the five-hundredth anniversary would proceed along similar lines. But by then nearly everything about Columbus, starting with the very notion of discovery, was being reëvaluated.

Among the few quincentenary projects to reach a satisfactory conclusion is a twelve-volume series called, somewhat portentously, the Repertorium Columbianum. The series, produced by U.C.L.A.'s Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, features new English translations of the most important documents associated with Columbus's voyages, including his "Book of Prophecies," transcripts of his logs, and the earliest accounts of his arrival in the New World. Some forty scholars collaborated on the project, which took fourteen years to complete; this fall, a decade behind schedule, the twelfth volume will finally appear. The series goes a long way toward explaining, if inadvertently, why the quincentenary turned into a fiasco. In his writings, Columbus reveals that the flip side of his optimism was a casual greed and cruelty. He appears to have been dishonest with just about everyone he encountered and, most of all, with himself, as he forever tried to rationalize his idiosyncratic preconceptions. If we are, indeed, always refashioning history to suit our self-image, then what are we to make of the fact that the Columbus who emerges from the Repertorium is evidently a quack?

Cristoforo Colombo was probably born in 1451, and almost certainly in the city of Genoa. Little is known about his early life, a gap that, over the past five centuries, has been filled with all sorts of speculation; it has been variously claimed that Columbus was Spanish, Corsican, Portuguese, French, German, Greek, Armenian, and even Jewish. According to contemporaries, he was tall, with red hair, blue eyes, and a ruddy complexion. Bartolomé de las Casas, whose father sailed with Columbus on his Second Voyage and who was himself one of the earliest Spanish settlers of the New World, wrote what might be called the first biography of Columbus, "History of the Indies." In it las Casas characterizes the explorer as "dignified and circumspect, affable with strangers." Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, the author of the competing "General and Natural History of the Indies," had also met Columbus. He describes him as "amusing when he wished to be; furious when he was angered."

Columbus's father and grandfather were both weavers, and he probably worked as a wool carder in the family business before heading out to sea. In 1476, while he was a crew member on a Genoese commercial fleet, his ship was attacked and sunk off the coast of Portugal; he survived by grabbing an oar and swimming ashore. For the next several years, he sailed out of Lisbon. Columbus reported that on one voyage, in 1477, he visited Iceland, which is plausible, and that he saw the tides there rise and fall fifty feet, which is not. He claimed that as a young man he had once duped some craven shipmates into facing a battle by convincing them that they were sailing north when, in reality, they were heading south. Even Samuel Eliot Morison, whose celebrated 1942 biography of Columbus, "Admiral of the Ocean Sea," is generally adulatory, finds this claim a stretch: "There is no record in all marine literature, to my knowledge, of such a hoax being pulled on seamen."

Just how Columbus came up with the idea of sailing west to get to the East—or, more to the point, why he became so fixated on the notion—is unclear, and was a matter of contention even in his lifetime. Oviedo, in his "General History," writes at some length about a rumor that Columbus had been given secret information on a "strange land" from a Spanish captain who was blown off course; Oviedo adds that he himself considers this rumor to be false. What was novel about Columbus's proposition was not, as generations of schoolchildren, following Washington Irving, have been taught, his position on the shape of the earth; as the nipple of Paradise demonstrates, Columbus was actually one of the few men of his age willing to entertain the notion that the world was not altogether spherical. Rather, what was innovative about Columbus's scheme was his calculations.

In Columbus's day, most geographers still relied on Ptolemy, who posited that the "known world" stretched a hundred and eighty degrees from east to west; the rest was water. This was a gross overstatement: the real span of what Ptolemy meant by the "known world"—Eurasia and Africa—was only about a hundred and twenty degrees. Still, even Ptolemy's calculations left far too much ocean to be traversed in an eighty-foot boat. Columbus rejected Ptolemy in favor of Pierre d'Ailly, an early-fifteenth-century French astrologer, who maintained that land extended for two hundred and twenty-five degrees, water for only a hundred and thirty-five. From there, Columbus argued that the travels of Marco Polo proved that China stretched farther east, that Japan was thirty degrees east of China, and that, because he planned to embark from the Canary Islands, he could subtract nine more degrees of water. When all this was not sufficient, he argued that d'Ailly had been too conservative all along.

By now, Columbus had succeeded in shrinking the ocean down to just sixty degrees. Yet still he was not done. In one last, Panglossian twist, he chose to follow not the standard—and roughly accurate—measure of a degree developed by the Greeks but a slightly lower figure, which had been put forward by the ninth-century Arab astronomer Al-Farghani. Conveniently, he also decided that Al-Farghani's calculations had been done in Roman miles as opposed to nautical miles, which are a fifth longer. On the basis of these and other manipulations, Columbus concluded that the distance from the Canary Islands westward to Japan was less than twenty-seven hundred miles. It was really thirteen thousand miles.

Columbus first presented his plan to King João II of Portugal in 1484. João, according to las Casas, found Columbus to be a "big talker," and was unimpressed by his reasoning. The following year, Columbus travelled to Spain, apparently leaving behind a string of unpaid debts. Ferdinand and Isabella, preoccupied with driving the Moors out of Granada, occasionally granted him an audience, and a small stipend, but mostly they seem to have ignored him. In 1490, a royal commission officially rejected Columbus's plan, on the ground that, in the words of las Casas, "his promises and proposals were hollow" and "could not be fulfilled." Two years later, the proposal was turned down again. Columbus was on his way to France, to try his luck there, when Ferdinand and Isabella, at the urging of one of their privy counsellors, had a change of heart.

Nothing survives to indicate what the Taino made of Columbus when he landed on the island of Guanahani, now called San Salvador, on October 12, 1492. Columbus, for his part, marvelled at the beauty and gentleness of the natives he encountered. In his log he wrote:

**{: .break one} ** I gave some of them red caps and glass beads that they put around their necks and many other things of little value with which they were very pleased, and they remained so entirely ours that it was a wonder. . . . All of those whom I saw were young men—for I saw no one of an age greater than thirty years—very well made, with very handsome and beautiful bodies and very pleasant features. . . . They do not bear arms, nor do they know them, for I showed them swords, and out of ignorance, they took them by the edge and cut themselves. **

Within days, Columbus had come up with a use for these gentle souls: on October 14th, writing in his log again, he addressed himself to Ferdinand and Isabella: "When your highnesses should so command, all of them can be brought to Castile, or be kept captive on their own island, for with fifty men you will keep them all in subjugation and make them do anything you wish."

The charge of genocide is generally assumed to be a late-twentieth-century indictment of Columbus, but it was first levelled nearly five hundred years ago, by las Casas. Originally a slaveholder himself, las Casas spent a decade in Hispaniola—the island now occupied by Haiti and the Dominican Republic—before undergoing a conversion. He devoted the next fifty years—he lived to be ninety-two—to trying, in vain, to defend the New World's indigenous peoples. His "History of the Indies" is at once sympathetic to Columbus as an individual and frank about his culpability. Referring to a Taino prisoner whose ears were chopped off during the Second Voyage, las Casas writes, "This was the first case of injustice perpetrated here in the Indies on the mistaken and vain assumption that what was being enacted was justice. It marked the beginning of the spilling of blood, later to become a river of blood, first on this island and then in every corner of these Indies."

Columbus continued to express his fondness for the Taino—"They are a people very generous of spirit, so that they give everything that they are asked for with the best will in the world," he wrote—even as he devised new and more grotesque employments for them. The ostensible purpose of his Second Voyage was to convert the natives of Hispaniola; the real goals were to establish a permanent settlement there and to find gold, of which Hispaniola has very little. Columbus arrived on the island in the fall of 1493, with a fleet of seventeen vessels carrying some twelve hundred men. He then sailed on to explore Cuba. Most of the settlers, meanwhile, turned their attention directly to rape and extortion. Returning to Hispaniola in the fall of 1494, Columbus found the island in chaos, and decided to rectify the situation by further punishing the victims. He shipped five hundred Taino off to the slave market in Seville, then raised an army that marched across the island murdering villagers with guns, swords, and dogs. (Using pack hounds to rip the natives apart was, las Casas wrote, an innovation "thought up, invented, and put into effect by the Devil.") Finally, Columbus imposed a system of tribute under which each adult was required to supply the Spanish with enough gold dust to fill a "Flanders hawk's bell" every three months. It has been estimated that between mistreatment, imported diseases, and outright slaughter, more than a third of the indigenous people of Hispaniola had been killed by 1496.

Columbus's administration of Hispaniola was recognized, even by his patrons, to be a disaster. On his Third Voyage, confronted with a rebellion among his own men, he instituted a system, later known as encomiendas, under which each Spaniard was granted a large piece of cultivated land and all the natives who lived on it. Evidently still convinced of his own righteousness, Columbus appealed to the King and Queen for a judge to be sent to the island. In response, Ferdinand and Isabella dispatched a knight named Francisco de Bobadilla. He arrived on August 23, 1500, and was greeted by the sight of seven Spaniards dangling from a gallows; Columbus had had them executed for plotting against him. De Bobadilla immediately had Columbus imprisoned and shipped back to Cadiz in chains. It did not take more than two generations for the entire native population of Hispaniola to be essentially wiped out.

At least among scholars, the art of celestial navigation was already quite advanced in the late fifteenth century, and, naturally, Columbus liked to portray himself as an expert in it. The evidence suggests otherwise. He probably didn't even know how to use an astrolabe, and many of the measurements he made with his quadrant—a simple instrument for measuring latitude—were wildly off base (hence his belief in a breast-shaped earth). On a pitching ship in the middle of the ocean, mistakes with a quadrant are understandable, but Columbus made them even on dry land. During his first stay in Cuba, for example, he calculated his latitude to be forty-two degrees north—the latitude of Cape Cod. Instead of being disturbed by this perplexing figure, three weeks later he reaffirmed it.

Columbus's deficiency as a celestial navigator means, presumably, that for eight Atlantic crossings he relied on dead reckoning, which is to say, on nothing more than a chart and a compass. Columbus had to calculate the distance he had travelled by estimating his velocity, then multiplying it by the number of times the sand had run through his hourglass. Not surprisingly, the figures he came up with this way were also often wrong. On his First Voyage, he famously kept two sets of logs, one set for his men and the other for himself. In the former, he deliberately understated the distances travelled, so that the men wouldn't become nervous about sailing so far from home. But in his own logs Columbus mistakenly overestimated the distances, so that the "fake" logs ended up being more accurate.

It's hard to see how, if Columbus had not possessed such confidence in his own abilities—a confidence bordering on self-delusion—he could have imagined embarking on his first journey or how he could have pressed on through so many dangers, forever hoping to find China and the Grand Khan. As is so often the case, however, the same qualities that kept him going eventually proved his undoing.

After returning to Spain in irons, Columbus had to wait six weeks before anyone bothered to have him set free. He was now forty-nine, and, in addition to possible mental illness, was suffering from arthritis and vision problems. Around this time, he composed a long, rambling letter to the governess of the prince, Don Juan, in which he complained that he had arrived at "such a condition that there is no one so vile that he does not think of insulting me." He spent the next year and a half in Granada and Seville, nursing his grievances.

During this period of enforced leisure, Columbus composed his "Book of Prophecies." In it, he argues that the discovery of the Indies was not just divinely inspired but foretold by Scripture. "Finally, what Jesus Christ Our Redemptor said and had previously said through the mouths of his holy prophets came to be," he writes. Once again applying his talent for creative math, he concludes that there are only a hundred and fifty-five years left until "the world must come to an end." At last, in 1502, he was granted permission to undertake his Fourth Voyage, according to one school of thought, because the royal family had grown tired of having him around. This time, he made it all the way to Panama, only to end up marooned on Jamaica, with a worm-eaten boat, for nearly a year.

As part of his original agreement with the Spanish crown, Columbus had asked for, and—extraordinarily—been granted, a ten-per-cent cut of the proceeds from his journey. The agreement had been made on the assumption that he would be setting up trading posts, not discovering whole new continents. The crown never lived up to the full terms of the agreement, and in his later years Columbus was constantly insisting on his rights, drafting and redrafting a set of petitions that have become known as the "Book of Privileges." At one point, the King hinted that he would offer Columbus an estate in Castile in return for dropping his many claims, but Columbus, with characteristic pigheadedness, declined. He was, it appears, well aware of the toll that colonization had taken on the Taino; toward the end of his life, he complained that he had heard that six out of every seven natives in Hispaniola had died since his departure. What concerned him, though, was not the deaths themselves but how they had cut into his revenues.

Before Columbus, no one had made a discovery—if that's the right word—to rival his, and, until someone encounters little green men, probably no one will. Yet what finally distinguishes Columbus as an explorer is his reluctance to acknowledge the magnitude of what he had found. In four trips across the ocean, he never, for obvious reasons, came upon anything remotely like what he had expected: not only were the people novel and strange; so were the geography, the topography, the flora, and the fauna. Still, to the end of his days Columbus insisted that Cuba was part of China, and that he had arrived at the gateway to Asia. He didn't want to have discovered someplace new; he wanted to have reached someplace old, and, as a result, was blind to the real nature of the world he had stumbled onto. He spent his final months trailing after the Spanish court, first to Salamanca and then to Valladolid, in despair over not receiving the recognition he felt was his due. When he wasn't travelling, he was confined to his bed by crippling arthritis.

Columbus died on May 20, 1506, by all accounts a bitter man. Las Casas saw a kind of justice in this. Turning Columbus's theology against him, he argued that it represented the will of God. Anyone who knows the history of Hispaniola, las Casas wrote, "will be in a position to understand that all the misfortunes and adversity, grief and suffering that later befell him came about as a proper reward and punishment for the crimes he had committed." ♦

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